ICE Has Held Grampa With Alzheimer's For 9 Months. Don't You Feel Safe?

Another day, another dispatch from the New Cruelty: Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been holding Noé de la Cruz, an old man who has Alzheimer's disease and diabetes (and is in remission from cancer) in a detention center in Texas, pending the outcome of his request for asylum. His family -- his wife and daughter are citizens -- has requested he be released to their care, but nothing doing! ICE doesn't let dangerous old men loose into the community, because what if he disappears and takes some American's job, or tapes a bunch of women's mouths shut and drives them across the border, or starts a caravan and murders all of us in our sleep? We need a wall -- An anti-ALZHEIMER'S wall!

"He's going to get lost, and we don't have family over there who can take care of him," Sandra said. Speaking through tears, Sandra recounted instances where her father called "three, five, ten times a day" from the Port Isabel detention facility near Los Fresnos, Texas, asking the same questions over and over.

"He also says that he's getting into fights, but when we go to see him, he doesn't have bruises," Sandra said. "We think that the fights are happening in his mind."

They decided that he's not dangerous to himself right now, and that he's not deteriorating, and that's why it's not required for them to release him," said Obando. [...] ICE's alternative, Obando told The Daily Beast, was to put de la Cruz in solitary confinement for his own protection. For a man with dementia, the damage of being completely isolated could be irreversible.

"They could put him in protective custody, meaning segregation," Obando said. "I don't think that putting someone with a mental illness in protective custody is the right way to go about this."

Ad yes, every subsequent paragraph of the story at the Daily Beast does manage to get more enraging. We learn that de la Cruz's only contact with his family has been through a glass partition because of a Catch-22 that would make Capt. John Yossarian's head spin:

"We couldn't go and have a physical interview or visit with him because he is the one who needs to request it, but he doesn't know how; he forgets how to do the request," Sandra said tearfully. "There's no way for us to help him, and that's hard. That's hard."

All he has to do is ask. But first he has to remember he has to ask. And he can't remember how. His caseworker, Major Major, was not available to comment, but as soon as he is available, he won't comment.

We are joking of course. Noé de la Cruz doesn't have a caseworker. Why would we waste money on such a thing?

As usual, ICE was simply bursting with bafflegab when asked about this case:

A spokesperson for ICE, which does not have a specific policy regarding detention for people with diagnosed cognitive decline, defended de la Cruz's detention.

"ICE makes custody determinations on a case-by-case basis, in accordance with U.S. law and Department of Homeland Security policy, considering the merits and factors of each case while adhering to current agency priorities, guidelines and legal mandates," said spokesperson Dani Bennett.

Translation: They've got your pa, and they have a right to do anything you can't stop them from doing.

The story cites Alzheimer's experts who point out that being kept in a detention facility with no particular treatment is almost certain to worsen de la Cruz's condition, and even if he eventually gets asylum, he's unlikely to get back whatever function he loses while incarcerated.

But wait! Isn't it vitally important to acknowledge that this mentally deteriorating old man is also one of the very BAD HOMBRES Donald Trump promised to protect us from? As the Daily Beast admits, in 2015, shortly after he was diagnosed with dementia, de la Cruz also caught a charge for possession of controlled substances and was given eight years' probation. (The story doesn't go into any further detail, so let's just assume he was driving fentanyl across the border and handing it out on playgrounds. Bet that had to be it.) But instead of emphasizing he's not Mexico's best -- he's bringing drugs, he's bringing crime, or at least finding them here -- the Daily Beast makes a bunch of crazy excuses based on egghead "researchers" who don't love America:

Researchers have documented potential links between dementia onset and antisocial, even low-grade criminal, behavior, and have pushed for the criminal justice system to factor in such diagnoses into charging and sentencing.

For an undocumented immigrant, even one with longstanding community ties and almost no criminal record, any drug charge, no matter the mitigating circumstances, can mean deportation.

Obando said de la Cruz's probation is the reason that, when he was caught crossing back into the US in 2018, he was subject to mandatory detention at Port Isabel. Well, tough, then, the law is the law, and so why is anyone making a fuss about this dangerous drug criminal who hates America and doesn't respect the law? Once he was arrested and detained, Obando cited conditions in Mexico in de la Cruz's petition for asylum: He has only two sisters, aged 83 and 93, in Mexico, and if he's deported, he's likely to be a crime victim, and at the very least will not get adequate care. His daughter says he can best be cared for here:

"They cannot take care of him," Sandra said. "I understand we have to follow the rules, that's why we have laws. But sometimes, it's a different situation. He's not a dangerous person, he's just not in a well condition."

Tough luck, lady. This is America, and we're busy becoming great again. Sure, maybe your father can't remember his grandchildren's names, or even who they are, but he isn't anyone Donald Trump would ever care about, so tough. We just keep winning more and more.

RAICES, meantime, is calling on people to contact the Port Isabel facility to ask for justice for Noé de la Cruz, and to sign an online petition calling for his release to his family, possibly because they are part of Sane America.

You guys, hi, hello, it is almost the holiday weekend, so we are going to share you a real video posted last night by "Doctor" Sebastian "Don't Call Me A Nazi" Gorka, that hilarious old knucklecuck. We guess now that he had to give up (or gave up voluntarily!) his Fox News contract, he just makes videos for the Twitter. Hoo ... ray?

Anyway, Gorka is super-excited that Donald Trump issued that order last night, giving Bill Barr all kinds of new powers to expose the Deep State for what it is and PROVE once and for all that the gremlins who live inside Trump's diarrhea are correct when they say Hillary ordered the Deep State to do an illegal witch hunt to Trump, yadda yadda yadda, you've seen these people huff paint before, we don't have to type it all.

Here is the video, after which Wonkette will either transcribe it OR we will provide our own dramatic interpretation. Which one will it be? We don't know! Would you be able to tell the difference between the two? We don't know!

We want to say right here at the outset that we hate Julian Assange. Aside from the sexual assault allegations against him, and aside from the fact that he's just a generally stinky and loathsome person who reportedly smeared poop on the walls at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, while reportedly not taking care of his cat, an innocent creature, he acted as Russia's handmaiden during the 2016 election, in order to further Russia's campaign to steal it for Donald Trump. All signs point to his campaign being a success!

So we are justifiably happy when bad things happen to Julian Assange. We are happy his name is shit the world over, and that any reputation WikiLeaks used to have for being on the side of freedom and transparency has been stuffed down the toilet where it belongs. We are happy he looked like such a sad-ass loser when the Ecuadorian embassy finally kicked him out and he was arrested.

And quite frankly, we were OK with the initial charge against him recently unsealed in the Eastern District of Virginia. If you'll remember, he was charged with trying to help Chelsea Manning hack a password into the Defense Department, which is not what journalists do. Journalists do not drive the get-away car for sources. Journalists do not hold their sources' hair back while they're stealing classified intel. Assange is essentially accused of doing all that.

Now, put all that aside. Because -- and this is key -- journalists do publish secrets they are provided by sources. That's First Amendment, chapter and verse, American as fucking apple pie and fast-food-induced diabetes. And that is what much of the superseding indictment of Assange unsealed yesterday was about. (And nope, it wasn't about anything regarding Assange's ratfucking the 2016 election or Hillary's emails. Why would the Trump Justice Department prosecute anything about that? It's all about the older Chelsea Manning stuff, the stuff the Obama Justice Department considered charging Assange with, but ultimately declined, because of that little thing called the First Amendment.)